IEM Provides Election Insights

December 5, 2003 | Reason.com

Anxious to know who's going to be the Democratic presidential candidate next year? Peering even further into the future, who's going to be prez in 2005? Well, right now, according to the futures markets, it looks like Howard Dean is a shoo-in for the Democratic Presidential nomination and Bush will run away with the national election. At least, that's how the traders over at the Iowa Electronic Markets are bidding. The IEMs were set up in the 1980s, to test a proposition that market prices aggregate all sorts of information, especially prices in futures markets, and can thus be used to predict outcomes. GEORGE NEUMANN, University of Iowa professor of economics, is one of the principals behind the IEM.